Linked by Eugenia Loli on Mon 9th May 2005 18:38 UTC, submitted by Robert Burns

"I have very mixed feelings about this release of Slackware. I do not think that the underlying philosophy of Slackware is obsolete. The concept of a system that can be configured and molded to the n'th degree is still in my opinion very much a good idea. However, this release of Slackware is not without its problems in execution." Read the review here.

excellent package management (pacman) which is MUCH better than pkgtool, swaret, slapt-get all together

That's a matter of personal taste. For me pacman adds complication that is avoidable. pkgtools are just a bunch of shell scripts, that can easily be modified if you want. Besides that the simplicity of Slackware packages is very comfortable, in the end it is just a tarball that sometimes contains one additional post-install script. I don't have to worry about what the package manager or maintainer thinks that I want.

In my opinion Slackware has the perfect balance: packages are comfortable, but nothing is done out of my control.

But different users have different needs, and some other users just want something that does everything of them.

what's wrong with them - they are BSD style and IMHO much better and even simpler than in Slack. You got only ONE (rc.conf) file where you can change basically everything.

They are different. Toggling a service by editing rc.conf is no simpler than flipping an executable permission. I'd say parsing a configuration file is even a bit more complex (depending on how it is implemented).

But tell me, how can Slackware be a distro of the past, just because your preferences differ? FYI: alternative package managers and init systems have been around for years. Did Slackware Linux fade away?